Double exposure

I can still hear the gruff timbre of his voice, a Polish immigrant for whom English was a second language. Asked his opinion of some televised current event or other, he replied: “I don’t vatch a TV. H’OK? Maybe some time joost to see what’s dey arr feeding the public.”

The phrase “what they are feeding the public” conjured up the image of a barnyard trough brimful of bland animal fodder where people lined up to uncritically consume a daily ration of “news” calories.

The phrase “what they are feeding the public” stuck with me. The man was a defector from behind the Iron Curtain, a physicist in the employ of the National Research Council in Ottawa. I thought: If you want to know about propaganda, this would be the fellow to talk to: An intellectual, a political refugee from an East European nation ruled by a communist regime, a diehard cynic and skeptic.

Now I, too, find myself watching TV network news to learn what it is they’re feeding the public nowadays. Not solely that, though. In this age of the Internet, a viewer is far better equipped than he’d been before to discern the different ways in which a news story is configured and presented. The attentive reader will be mindful of not only what's in the news, but also of what’s been left out of it.

James Baldwin had once described a writer’s capacity for listening this way: “[A] writer is never listening to what is being said, he is never listening to what he is being told. He is listening to what is not (italics) being said, he is listening to what he is not (italics) being told, which means that he is trying to discover the purpose of the communication.” (1)

What, according to Baldwin, is true of writers, is now also true for millions of news junkies who get their information online. Which may explain, in part, why it is public trust in the veracity of mainstream media ranks generally low. (2)

Their sins of ommission in reportage, which speak to "the purpose of the communication," are often glaring; the failure to adequately report on Israel's vicious assault on the Gaza Strip, last December and January, being a salient example.

Quote from Haroon Siddiqui in the Toronto Star: “[Judge Richard] Goldstone's report is a condemnation not only of Israel but also its apologists in Canada, including the media. The latter are now busy burying the report under an orchestrated avalanche of negative reaction without ever properly reporting its contents.” (3)

The headline for Nathan Guttman’s article in the Jewish Forward: “A Quick Burial for Goldstone Report on Gaza.” (4)

A growing awareness of the news report as a product tailored to sell us on a given narrative makes it more likely that the holes in a current story will not go unnoticed; an insight that extends to the many forms of media; fewer things get past the informed citizen in today’s world.

Consider this passage from the autobiography of notorious fraud artist, Julius Melnitzer. In 1992, A Canadian court had sentenced Melnitzer to nine years in prison on 43 charges of fraud totalling more than $67-million. The disgraced lawyer used the two-and-a-half years he actually served time to pen his memoirs.

“I believed in criminal law,” he wrote. “I valued procedural justice in a meaningful, passionate, substantive way that filled an inner vacuum. The strong civil libertarian tendencies endemic to children of Holocaust survivors, the streak of antiauthorianism that got me tossed out of high school, my internal sense of not belonging, and my own victim mentality gave me the perfect psychological makeup for a specialty that pitted outcasts against the State.” (5)

Melnitzer penned those words in a prison cell in a country where Holocaust revisionists like Ernst Zundel have endured long and costly trials with the prospect of prison time hanging over them, all for peacefully expressing their views on a matter of history; with the charges against Zundel and others brought at the behest of Jewish groups that included both Holocaust survivors and their families, with the touted “strong civil libertarian tendencies endemic to children of Holocaust survivors” not being in any way toweringly evident.

Of all the civil liberties issues in matters to do with free speech, nothing so stridently calls forth the strong arm of intellectual repression by the State in our fair dominion as manifestations of Holocaust revisionism. If anyone needs the qualities Melnitzer has ascribed to himself -- the “strong civil libertarian tendencies,” the “streak of antiauthorianism,” and a “sense of not belonging” -- it’s a Holocaust revisionist, an outcast with often limited resources who is pitted against the limitless resources of the State, goaded by an unforgiving Holocaust lobby.


1. James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York, 1985, p, 95.

2. “Public trust in US media eroding: Pew study,” Agence France Press, September 14, 2009.

3. Haroon Siddiqui, “Shining a light on Israeli aggression in Gaza,”
The Toronto Star, September 20, 2009.

4. Nathan Guttman, “A Quick Burial for Goldstone Report on Gaza,”
Jewish Forward, online September 23, 2009.

5. Julius Melnitzer, Maximum Minimum Medium, Key Porter Books: Toronto, 1995, p. 103.

Post Traumatic Embitterment Disorder: Treatable?

Dr Prendergast received the forty-something man and woman, two siblings, in his office promptly at 10 a.m. They were concerned by their elderly father’s state of mind. Since his retirement, he’d been spending a lot of time brooding on the past.

Dr Prendergast: “You say your father survived the Holocaust?”

Man: “Yes.”

Dr Prendergast: “And the problem is?”

Woman: “Well, he seems of late, now that he’s got more leisure time to dwell on the past, to have become very embittered by the experiences he had to endure as a Jew during the war. Not only that -- but he’s been going to area high schools to give talks, to share those experiences with the students.”

Dr Prendergast: “Has he?”

Man: “Oh, yes. His degree of bitterness is so intense we believe it has reached clinical proportions. Together with an obsessive need to make sure no one is left unaware, in any doubt, of what he had to endure.”

Dr Prendergast: “Possibly a case of PTED, do you think?”

Woman: “PTED?”

Dr Prendergast: “That’s ‘post traumatic embitterment disorder.’”

Man: “Possibly. . . What are some of its symptoms?”

Dr Prendergast: “According to Dr Michael Linden, our German colleague, who discovered this disturbing pattern of behaviour,
what we’re dealing with here is a pathological reaction to a single, negative life event -- in this instance, the Holocaust -- now being obsessed over as grossly unjust, as violation of his person on a very deep level, and a compulsion to showcase his suffering for all the world to see.”

Woman: “That seems familiar.”

Dr Prendergast: “According to Dr Linden, sufferers of PTED have a tendency to rewind and re-run intrusive thoughts and memories over and over again, long, long after the triggering-event has come and gone. In addition, they’re also consumed by an intense desire for revenge. For payback.”

Man: “It’s interesting you mention that. Because, Dad has told us that he’s seen that new Quentin Tarantino movie, Inglourious Basterds, about a half-dozen times, claiming he finds its motif of Jews avenging the Holocaust to be ‘therapeutic’ for him.”

Dr Prendergast: “There you go. The appetite for vengeance!”

Woman: “So what you’re saying is, persons who feel they’ve been especially wronged in life, been humiliated and endured injustice in some form are especially prone to this brain disorder?”

Dr Prendergast: “Exactly. Moreover, such people sometimes show a righteous, missionary zeal in their endeavour to improve matters. For example, you say he’s been going to area schools to share his experiences with the students. To promote tolerance, no doubt?”

Man: “I believe so.”

Dr Prendergast: “Here let me quote Dr Linden’s own words from this text regarding PTED sufferers: ‘These people don’t have the feeling that they must change, but rather have the idea that the world should change or the oppressor should change.’”

Woman: “Interesting.”

Dr Prendergast: “However, I caution you that PTED has not as yet been given official recognition as a mental disorder. That is, it has yet to be listed in our psychiatric Bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Nevertheless, we’re very hopeful that when the fifth edition is published, in 2012, that PTED will be among the newly-discovered pathologies to be included. That will, in fact, constitute the DSM’s first major revision since 1994.”

Man: “Will that make a big difference?”

Dr Prendergast: “I should think so. Consider, for example, how it impacted Western society after the DSM delisted homosexality as a mental disorder in the 1986 edition.”


NOTE: The foregoing was a fictional account of what might lie just around the corner -- or not. Perhaps, Holocaust survivors will be put into a special category and exempted where can’t-let-go-of-it bitterness tied to PTED is concerned.

For additional information concerning the scourge of this newfound malady google PTED and the name Dr Michael Linden.

Viva Las Vegas, Viva "the Holocaust"

In 1959, I was 11 years old, living frugally with my parents, both of whom were, as they say, gainfully employed.

My father ran a small supermarket, while my mother managed her rooming house for transients up on the 2nd floor. They were very careful about quickly paying off their debts and putting away their savings for a rainy day.

For example, if I asked for a quarter to go to the movies with my school mates on a Saturday afternoon, my parents, as often as not, would deny my request; sometimes, with a tedious lecture on my need to learn to exercise thrift.

One day, one of my mother’s transient lodgers moved out leaving behind a deck of cards. The man had used them to play solitaire, and had taught me how.

I was in the middle of a game of solitaire when my father came upstairs for supper and noticed me off in a corner, playing. He came over and brusquely interrupted me.

Gathering up the cards, he explained that playing solitaire was an unseemly actvity -- one that was worthy only of shiftless gypsies -- and relieved me of the deck.

Several years later, the Main Street property my parents owned quadrupled in value during a period of economic boom. They sold it, and went into semi-retirement. They travelled abroad. Travels that even included Las Vegas, where they spent a week gambling and going to shows.

It was in August in 1974 -- during the week President Nixon had resigned his office -- that my parents spent a week in Las Vegas. Since we had little in common, my father and I typically bridged the divide that separated us by discussing current events. I asked him how the Americans he met in Vegas reacted to Nixon resigning his office. He shrugged, so I asked instead about how he had enjoyed Sin City.

It was obvious the man was proud of the fact that he was able to afford to vacation there, for in his circle of friends it meant he had “arrived.” I have no interest in gambling or Las Vegas, least of all in gambling in Las Vegas, but I thought it polite to at least pretend to share his enthusiasm.

“What kind of gambling do you do?” I asked.

“I just pump a roll of quarters into a slot machine -- and hope to get lucky.”

“Any luck?”

“Naw . . .”

Naturally, I remembered the times I had to beg him for two-bits to go see a Western during a matinee at the movie-theatre down the street, and of the time he seized my deck of playing cards.

It is through this Las Vegas that-was-then, this-is-now peephole that I consider all of the hoopla that attends the release of Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, a Judeo-centric World War Two satirical sendup entitled Inglourious Basterds.

Against a backdrop of sober Holocaust pieties, Tarantino and his stars Brad Pitt et al. are perfectly free to blithely screw over the received version of the Holocaust narrative. Even as in Australia and Austria -- and, of course, in the German Fatherland -- daring revisionists languish in prison, punished for having demonstrated their temerity by challening the typical Hollywood-inspired version of the traditional Holocaust story.

Summer of '09

The Holocaust is
a bikini dissolving
in pristine water . . .